Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia »

H. J. Jackson is professor, Department of English, University of Toronto. She has published extensively on Romantic literature, and her book Marginalia was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in literarty criticism.

This inviting book explores reading practices in the Romantic Age through the lens of the notations that readers jotted in their books. H. J. Jackson analyzes the marginalia of British readers both famous and obscure. She discovers fascinating details about literacy, the availability of books, and how people were reading during the years from 1790 to 1830.

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Library Journal

In this follow-up to her magisterial Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Jackson (English, Univ. of Toronto) focuses on annotations that were made in books during the Romantic Age-that exciting period between 1790 and 1830 of intellectual development in England-through an analysis of some 2000 books. Owing to that time period's explosive growth in publishing, readers of all classes were able to buy their own books, and they customized them in due course. Now a relatively discouraged technique, marginalia was once a legitimate tool for learning and scholarly communication. Beginning with a succinct exploration of the reading, writing, and publishing of the era, Jackson examines the annotations of literary giants (e.g., William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats), scholars, and ordinary readers alike found in the British Library. (She acknowledges but does not use William St. Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, a more ambitious study of the era.) Although targeting the erudite, this text can be an engrossing entry into the study of learning, culture, and societal change for any reader willing to approach it. Recommended for specialized libraries.-Shelley Cox, emerita, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Contents
List of Illustrations....................ix
Preface....................xi
Introduction: The Reading Environment....................1
1 Mundane Marginalia....................60
2 Socializing with Books....................121
3 Custodians to Posterity....................198
4 The Reading Mind....................249
Conclusion....................299
Notes....................307
Bibliography of Books with Manuscript Notes....................325
Bibliography of Secondary Sources....................340
Index....................353